leaves him as strong and
fresh as ever.

"Thirty days of campaigning leaves the old soldier a wreck. Why?
Because as a man grows older he loses the ability to sleep soundly. He
carries the nervous strain of one day over to the next. Life is a
serious problem to a man over thirty. To a man under thirty it is
simply a game. For my part, give me men who can play at war."

So it was with Pierre le Rouge. He woke with a faint heaviness of
head, and stretched himself. There were many sore places, but nothing
more. He looked up, and the slant winter sun cut across his face and
made a patch of bright yellow on the wall beside him.

Next he heard a faint humming, and, turning his head, saw a boy of
fourteen or perhaps a little more, busily cleaning a rifle in a way
that betokened the most expert knowledge of the weapon. Pierre himself
knew rifles as a preacher knows his Bible, and as he lay half awake and
half asleep he smiled with enjoyment to see the deft fingers move here
and there, wiping away the oil. A green hand will spend half a day
cleaning a gun, and then do the work imperfectly; an expert does the
job efficiently in ten minutes. This was an expert.

Undoubtedly this was a true son of the mountain desert. He wore his
old slouch hat even in the house, and his skin was that olive brown
which comes from many years of exposure to the wind and sun. At the
same time there was a peculiar fineness about the boy. His feet were
astonishingly small and the hands thin and slender for all their supple
strength. And his neck was not bony, as it is in most youths at this
gawky age, but smoothly rounded.

Men grow big of bone and sparse of flesh in the mountain desert. It
was the more surprising to Pierre to see this young fellow with the
marvelously delicate-cut features. By some freak of nature here was a
place where the breed ran to high blood.

The cleaning completed, the boy tossed the butt of the gun to his
shoulder and squinted down the barrel. Then he loaded the magazine,
weighted the gun deftly at the balance, and dropped the rifle across
his knees.

"Morning," said Pierre le Rouge cheerily, and swung off the bunk to the
floor. "How old's the gun?"

The boy, without the slightest show of excitement, snapped the butt to
his shoulder and drew a bead on Pierre's breast.

"Sit down before you get all heated up," said a musical voice.
"There's nobody waiting for you on horseback."

And Pierre sat d